That Kid Has a Bright Future
When I was a journalism student, I was fired by my college newspaper. So I graduated with no prospects and spent the summer sending out resumes and teaching myself to juggle in the back yard of my parent’s house. Eventually, I got an interview with and was hired by the publisher of the Fox ValleyLabor News in Aurora, Illinois.
My success in that interview stands in stark contrast to my almost uninterrupted record of job interview humiliations.
After interviewing at one mid-size Indiana day, I received a rejection letter but called the editor to press for where I went wrong. Her voice became flinty as she asked me why I chose to wear a wrinkled cardigan sweater with a visible hole in it and referred to her role as editor as”precarious.” I said thanks and hung up.
At an interview in Arizona, I sat in the waiting room with sweating palms and read the paper. I was surprised when I met the editor and he suggested I go wash my face. Then I looked in the mirror. The news print had gotten on my hands and I spread it to my face so i looked like Al Jolson getting ready to sing “Swanee. “ I didn’t get the job.
Just one more humiliation. I had an interview with the editor of a big daily paper in California during a vacation there. I was very excited about it until the editor started looking for a room where we could talk. We went from office to office but he couldn’t find one that matched the importance of our talk until he opened a door labeled “Storage” and he invited me in. We perched — this is true — on cardboard boxes full of copying machine paper to discuss my future. I didn’t get that job either.
Oh, I also once flew 400 miles to interview and when I got there the editor had forgotten about me and was gone.
At Fox Valley, we covered labor union activity, but union membership was plummeting and I guess the paper wasn’t profitable because first, the guy who sold advertising left, and then the publisher announced he was moving production of the paper into the basement of his suburban home. That was unsustainable and one day he called me into his kitchen upstairs and persuaded me to resign, maybe to avoid paying severance.
From that inauspicious beginning I went on to work for daily newspapers in Chicago, San Diego and served as the Washington correspondent for papers in Arizona and Oregon, before retiring after 17 years at Bloomberg News. I recently looked to see how long the Fox Valley Labor News operated and to my surprise found that while it is diminished, it was still publishing last year. I would have never guessed a paper based in a basement would stay in the business so long. Of course, the publisher of the Labor News, as he watched me leave his kitchen, probably wasn’t thinking, “That kid has a bright future in this business.”
